Dear Old Dead(93)

By the time Victor came back, Martha was agitated beyond belief, hopping up and down, angry-frantic, the way she got when her anxieties got out of control. It didn’t help that Ida had undoubtedly been right about how busy she was going to be. In the twenty minutes before Victor’s car arrived at the entrance to the east building, Martha had seen two dozen people climbing the steps to the west building, and four ambulances coming in to the doors around the side. Dear God, Martha hated life in Harlem. She didn’t think anybody should have to do the kind of things she did in this place or witness the kind of things she witnessed. In a perfect world, the government would take care of all of this, and people like Martha wouldn’t even have to think about it.

Victor got out of his car only after his driver had come around to open his door. That was the drill they had when the neighborhood felt too jumpy, so that Victor wouldn’t get mugged. As soon as Victor got out on the sidewalk, Martha opened the door to the east building and went out on the stoop. She held the door open with her foot and waited for Victor to climb the stairs. If she let the door shut, it would lock automatically. She would have to ring the bell to be let inside again, and she didn’t want that. Victor came up to her, smiled vaguely, and passed her. Martha followed him inside, letting the door hiss shut on its cylinder. Victor looked tired. Martha didn’t care.

“Well?” she said.

“Well what?” Victor looked around. The entry hall was empty. The reception room was empty, too. He motioned through the archway and said, “I’m going to go sit down. I’m tired.”

“I don’t care if you’re tired, Victor. I want to know what happened. Did you see them? Did you find out what they wanted?”

“I overheard them talking to Dave Geraldino,” Victor said.

There were two worn sofas in the reception room. There were three large club chairs with patched arms and sagging springs. There were a couple of hard chairs with wooden backs. He chose one of the club chairs and sat down. Martha couldn’t bear the thought of sitting. She had to pace.

“Well?” she said again. “What was it about? What did you overhear?”

“It was about the contest,” Victor said.

Martha drew a blank. “What contest?”

“The Father’s Day contest down at the paper. You know, what I do on my job. It was about that.”

“It was about it how?”

Victor shrugged. “Well, you know. How do the contests run. What happens with the winners. That kind of thing. Lisa was there, too. Lisa Hasserdorf. My boss.”

This was like swimming through mud. This was really awful. Martha hated talking to Victor.

“Look,” she said. “Try to make sense. Demarkian and Sheed went all the way downtown just to talk to Dave Geraldino and Lisa Hasserdorf about the contest? Doesn’t that seem strange to you?”

“It wasn’t just this contest. It was all the contests that I’ve run. And no. It doesn’t seem strange to me.”

“It doesn’t?”

“No. And it shouldn’t seem strange to you, either.”

“Oh, Victor, for God’s sake. Make sense. Nobody cares about those contests. Even the paper doesn’t care about them. They’re just something Grandfather liked to do because that sort of thing works so well in other places.”

Victor shifted in his chair. The line of his leg was elegant. The cut of his suit was beyond belief. He had a dreamy smile on his face. Was Martha crazy, or was he even vaguer and stranger than usual? There was something Martha definitely didn’t like in this attitude of Victor’s. There was something menacing under the surface. Had it always been there? Martha walked quickly away from Victor’s chair and went to look out the window.

“You’re not making sense,” she said again. “If you’ve got some idea why Demarkian and Sheed are doing what they’re doing, I wish you’d tell me. I don’t like the way things are going. I keep expecting one of us to be arrested at any moment. It’s making me physically ill.”

“They got the names of the people who wouldn’t let themselves be photographed,” Victor told her placidly. “The one from the supercontest last year, with the quarter million payoff. Mrs. Esther Stancowycz from Brooklyn. I love the name Esther Stancowycz, don’t you?”

“I don’t know.” Martha’s voice had a wild note to it. She could hear it. “Why should I like it?”

“They got the name of that woman in Queens who won the Presidents’ Day contest in February, too. Miss Sharon Cortez. All the names they got were names of women. Of course, they had to be women.”